Given the ever-increasing desirability of combining voice and other media sessions, steps towards associating a traditional telephony device with a computing device are being made, such that voice sessions can be provided between two telephony devices and an associated video or data session is provided between the associated computing devices. In this fashion, traditional telephony networks are used to provide superior voice quality, while data networks are used to provide superior video and data session quality. For ease of reference, the computing devices, which are associated with respective telephony devices, are referred to as multimedia clients. An exemplary system is provided in U.S. application Ser. No. 10/028,510 filed Dec. 20, 2001, which is incorporated herein by reference in its entirety.
Providing such multimedia associations requires multiple entities in the data and telephony networks to determine if the parties associated with a voice session are associated with multimedia clients. As with any new technology, there are a few subscribers during initial deployment, and there is a need to minimize expenses and loads on network equipment that support the multimedia-services. Without an efficient system for identifying multimedia client availability, each of the telephony switches in the telephony network through which the call is routed would have to be modified to handle multimedia addressing capability, which would result in a very expensive and complex deployment. Given the relatively small number of subscribers in light of all telephony users, there is a need to alert the appropriate network equipment as to a subscriber's multimedia capability, instead of having to check the parties to each call to see if a multimedia client is associated with the respective parties. In this fashion, the network equipment impacted by the provision of multimedia services can gradually increase capacity as the number of subscribers to these services increases.